“They’re all here now, Dr Sciavoni—”
Sciavoni looked as though he could be holding a conductor’s baton—he had something of the poise and personal electricity. But maybe not for a symphony orchestra, maybe for a night club band. Sciavoni wasn’t quite impressive enough for the occasion he was now called upon to supervise.
He had a habit of opening his eyes imperceptibly while he was speaking to someone. The extra white made the eyes seem to gleam from his sallow face with an inner light. But it was a mechanical trick rather than real charisma.
Sciavoni cleared his throat and made a speech of welcome.
“Gentlemen. Ladies too, I’m pleased to see. First off, let me say how delighted I am to welcome you to the State of Nevada. And to the USA, for those of you whose first visit this is—” He smiled engagingly at the Russians in their heavy tweed suits.
Tomaso Sciavoni, who’d been put in charge of the reception team, worked for NASA. Sole’s attention wandered as ‘the conductor’ talked on about the communication and data-processing facilities available at the airstrip—facilities of no-place they seemed, servomechanisms of the void in Man. He found Sciavoni’s slightly theatrical gestures and occasional gleams of the eyes as meaningless, after a while, as this whole house of cards erected in the desert. Apparently the place had something to do with the Atomic Energy Commission—but all trace of alternative function had been carefully erased. A quiet fantasy developed in his mind of white-helmeted soldiers walking round the desert with giant gum erasers, rubbing out a face here, and a building there, and a jet plane somewhere else—and pencilling in alibi men and alibi machinery. When the alien spacecraft landed, did they hope a giant eraser would descend from the sky and remove it conveniently too?
Sciavoni broke off talking about protocol and personalities and cocked his head, as news came through the plug in his ear.
“Tracking reports a separation,” he announced. “Right now the Globe is heading up over the East Siberian Sea. A smaller vehicle is veering away, swinging sharply towards North America. Altitude is falling rapidly. It’s at eight hundred nautical miles now. Velocity is down from an initial ten thousand to nine thousand five and falling—
Sciavoni carried on a running commentary as the smaller vehicle dropped swiftly across the roof of the world. Above the Arctic ice. Over the Beaufort Sea. Mackenzie Bay. The Yukon. Then along the chain of the Rocky Mountains, till over Western Montana it began sharply decelerating and losing height.
“We’ve got visual acquisition now. The vehicle’s a blunt cylinder shape about a hundred metres long by thirty. There’s no indication of the means of propulsion. It’s crossing the Idaho stateline now at an altitude of eighty nautical miles. Velocity down to three thousand—”
“I’ll tell you one thing, Chris,” hissed Zwingler. “We’d give our eyeteeth to be able to handle reentry the way they’re doing now. I hate to think of the energy wastage—”
“They’re across the Nevada stateline now. Altitude ten nautical miles. Velocity one thousand. Commencing rapid descent—”
“What are we all standing about inside for anyway?”
Sole turned away from the throng that were now pressing closer to the window, hesitated only briefly before heading downstairs.
The soldier stepped in his way to scrutinize his identity tab, then pushed the glass door open and followed him outside.
Sole gazed north.
Already a shape was visible. A rushing blob of darkness against the stars.
“Can’t hear a sound. How’s that thing staying in the air?” The soldier shivered.
“I hate to think. Antigravity? That’s only a word. It doesn’t mean anything.”
“If there’s a word, Mister, must mean somethin’—”
“No, there are a lot of words for things that don’t exist. Imaginary things.”
“Such as what?”
“Oh I dunno. God, maybe. Telepathy. The soul.”
“I don’t much care for that notion, Doctor What’s-your-name. Place I come from, words mean things.”
The squat dark cigar shape, without portholes or fins, hung briefly over the airstrip. No lights or jetglow visible. No engine noise audible.
Slowly and silently it slid down on to the concrete, a couple of hundred yards from where they stood. At the last moment before it grounded, Sole glanced up at the mass of faces pressed to the long window upstairs. They looked like kids staring into a sweetshop.
Then came the sound of people fighting their way downstairs, pushing and elbowing.
“How about some traffic duty, soldier?” said a familiar voice.
Zwingler darted a curious glance at Sole, while he dusted off his own suit and smoothed the creases out of it.
“Gentlemen! Ladies!” cried Sciavoni. “Let’s not trip each other up. May I suggest we stick to protocol? The alien vehicle will be met by the agreed delegation of five, consisting of Dr Stepanov, Major Zaitsev, Mr Zwingler, myself and Dr Sole—”
Sole reacted with surprise.
“I didn’t know about that, Tom, honest. When was that arranged? I can’t have been concentrating.”
Zwingler laughed eerily.
“Your subconscious must have propelled you downstairs, in that case. You know, there was a time when I wondered why you, with your dubious attitudes, were involved in that speech project at Haddon. Not any more. You must have your own built-in pragmatism. Things just arrange themselves for you, without you paying attention.”
“Bullshit, Tom.”
Zwingler dealt him a mock blow in the back, pushing him forward.
“Do the Dr Livingstone bit for us. We didn’t perform any too well in the opinion of the Russians. What was that Paulus Sherman said? Ball’s in their court? Balls to you, Doctor Sole—”
As the five men approached the dark cylinder, a circular doorway opened up in the side and a ramp slid down to ground level. A cone of yellow light flooded the concrete.
“Will you go up first, Dr Sole,” requested Stepanov, the burly Russian scientist whose name Sole remembered reading in the Leapfrog Transcripts. “Both great powers need somebody to hate cordially—”
Yet, in the event, precedence was decided for them.
An eerily tall figure moved into the shining cone of light and came down casually to meet them.
It was half as tall again as a six foot man. Skinny and flat-nosed with great sad eyes set far apart and with ears like crinkly paper bags and a dark orange slash of a mouth—as the Leapfrog astronauts had reported. A simple transparent mask covered its mouth and nose. Thin scarlet wires ran from ears and mouth to a pack strapped on to its long thin chest. The figure wore a grey silky coverall and grey forked boots, like a Japanese workman’s.
No air tanks. The face-mask would have to be a permeable filter membrane…
The being drifted down the ramp towards them, casual and faintly sad, looking a little like an El Greco saint, and a little like a starved Giacometti sculpture.
Sole couldn’t think of anything momentous—or even unmomentous—to say.
So their visitor said it for them. He spoke neutral east coast American—a perfect copy of the accent of the speech tapes flown up by Leapfrog.
“Nice planet you have here. How many languages are spoken?”
Zwingler jabbed Sole in the back a second time, more viciously, near his kidneys.
“Why, thousands I suppose,” stammered Sole. “If you count all of them. Dozens of major languages at least! We sent you tapes of English, that’s the main international language. You’ve learnt remarkably fast! How did you do it?”
“By recording your television transmissions on the way in. But we needed a key. Which your astronauts gave us. So we saved time.”